One contributor from the audience commented that in the campaigning NGO's (hopefully not the co-opted ones - an interesting concept of Patrick's - CONGOS) there is less criticism of the World Bank now relative to the IMF. There is a sense that the World Bank has shifted somewhat - albeit only in a reformist way.
It occurred to me after the discussion that one of the problems is that the agency that has the clearest role as the bank of the world is the IMF - it oversees the core roles of liquidity, credit in crisis, printing of money (Special Drawing Rights) and exchanges of assets and debits between countries. Much of this is partial and limited but nevertheless it is closer to the global equivalent of a national bank. By comparison the "World Bank" is really a world development bank - a distributor of supposed charity on degrading terms but a function but it is not central to the workings of the global economy. It could be abolished by the end of the year and capitalism would still roll on.
The difficulty is combining theory with practice. In agitational terms, when demonstrators are just about to face a police charge, the slogans are more obviously targetted against the "World Bank". But many of its activities are constrained by the inevitable workings of global finance capital. The better target would be the IMF, the rich man's club. That is closer to the colloquial meaning of a world bank.
Chris Burford
London